The specificity of character and social context is what makes Ricky Gervais's The Office and Extras so funny and so cringe-makingly convincing, and they're absent from this comic Hollywood fable set in an anonymous Anytown (actually Lowell, Massachusetts, New England's answer to Slough), in which everyone is much the same.

The dramatic premise is a switch on the old story of a man being compelled to speak the absolute truth in a world of casual liars. Here Gervais's variation on David Brent is Mark Bellison, "the chubby little loser" who lives in an innocent, prelapsarian world where everyone tells the truth. There's a certain comic mileage (or yardage) in this, and he extracts a few hundred yards of it with jokes featuring honest advertising and waiters speaking their minds. Most interesting, though not laugh-aloud funny, is the notion of Mark writing scripts for Lecture Films. Their productions simply have a narrator talking to camera about a historical event because to tell a story would be to create an untruthful fiction.

Then Mark discovers lying, or (because this society has no word for "lie") saying "that which is not". This enables him to make money and con attractive women into having sex. When this seam has been exhausted he consoles his dying mother with the prospect of a wonderful afterlife and meeting "the man in the sky', which turns him into a seer and then a messiah. With nowhere to go, Gervais & Co get sentimental about the lovability of awkward, unattractive men, and the film fizzles out.